Portugal Golden Visa · residence by investment (ARI)
The Portugal Golden Visa, with nothing hidden.
ā¬5,000 for you and your spouse. ā¬700 per extra family member. Half on engagement, half when your file goes to AIMA. A partner Portuguese immigration lawyer runs your case from the first document to the residence card, and every government fee is published on this page.
- Seven days a year in Portugal. That's it. Your tax life stays exactly where it is.
- American? We already crashed into the FATCA wall with another client. You get to skip that part.
- Every government fee below comes straight from Portaria 307/2023.
€2,500 + €2,500
on engagement, then on submission
8–10 months
to biometrics, on our current files
7 days
a year in Portugal, that's the stay rule
✓ 7,200+ expats helped
✓ Applications at AIMA right now: 8 families in the system, and we'll tell you what their files are doing
“Very good experiences with Novomove” Greg S., Nomad Gate
Hey, I'm Philip.
Let me guess. You're not actually moving to Portugal. You want a door. A European one, that your kids can walk through in ten years if things at home go sideways, and you're willing to park €500,000 for five years to hold it open. Fair.
So you started researching, and now you have four tabs open, three different prices for the same visa, and one firm that won't tell you anything until you “hop on a quick call”. Same visa. Same government. Same forms. Somebody isn't being straight with you, and you can't tell who.
This page is my answer to that. Our fee, the government's fees, the honest timeline, the traps we've already hit for you. Read it all, then bring your questions to our team on a free call. Nobody will pitch you. The families we've taken through this found us mostly by word of mouth, and one of them wrote about us in public without being asked. You'll find him further down.
~Philip Bitnik, Founder, Novomove
Qualifying routes
Three ways in. Nearly everyone takes the first door.
Portugal rewrote its nationality law in April 2026 and the Constitutional Court fight over it still isn't finished, so check the date on anything you read, this page included. The routes below are current as of July 2026. Property hasn't qualified since 2023, whatever that flat listing says.
Most common
Qualifying fund
€500,000
Registered with the CMVM, at least 60% invested in companies based in Portugal, no direct or indirect property exposure, held for five years. You can split it across more than one qualifying fund.
Lowest ticket
Cultural heritage donation
€250,000
Support for artistic production or the recovery of national heritage, reduced to €200,000 in low-density areas. Half the ticket of the fund route, and the money is gone rather than invested. Some people prefer that trade.
Rarely used
Research, business or jobs
€500,000 or 10 jobs
€500,000 into the national scientific system, or €500,000 into a Portuguese company creating five permanent jobs for three years, or ten permanent jobs with no minimum investment at all. Eight jobs in low-density areas.
And about the fund itself: that's your call, made with the fund manager and whoever advises you on money. I'm not an investment adviser and I won't play one on the internet. My job starts after you've decided: checking your investment ticks every Golden Visa box, then building an AIMA application around it that doesn't bounce.
The bit everyone's panicking about
Yes, citizenship moved to ten years. Now read the part nobody's telling you.
Here's what actually happened, minus the panic. Portugal stretched the citizenship wait for most non-EU applicants, and the clock now starts when your first card is issued, not when you apply. Start today and your realistic passport date sits deep in the 2030s. Investors are fighting it in court as we speak, so even that isn't final.
Now the part the doom headlines buried. Permanent residency at five years didn't move an inch. Year five, you apply for PR, pull your money out of the fund, and stop paying renewals. The €500,000 is chained to the visa, not to a passport.
But careful, PR comes in two flavours and picking the wrong one wrecks the whole plan. Standard PR wants you actually living here, about six months a year. Do that and congratulations, you just became a Portuguese tax resident, which is precisely what you were paying to avoid. Investment PR costs more, asks for no minimum stay, and hands every family member their own card. If tax residency is the thing you're dodging, this one distinction is worth more than everything else on this page. Ask your current provider which of the two they mean. Time how long it takes them to answer.
What this means for your timing
Portugal keeps rewriting the rules, and files already in the system have so far been judged by the rules that were live when they went in. A pattern, not a promise. If the passport is your whole reason for doing this, spend €80 on the lawyer before you spend €500,000 on the fund. Cheap insurance.
Scope
What you're actually paying €5,000 for
Most of this happens in Portuguese government offices you will never set foot in, which is rather the point. Here's the full list, so the next quote that lands in your inbox has something honest to be compared against.
Included
✓ Case strategy with the partner immigration lawyer, and a video call with her before anything starts
✓ A document checklist built for your nationality and your family, not a generic PDF
✓ Every power of attorney drafted: the main ARI POA, the social security POA, the declaration of compliance, the criminal record authorisation, the investor responsibility term for each dependent
✓ Legal review of your fund subscription and the two investment documents AIMA requires
✓ Social security declarations, which means the lawyer physically attending Seg Social, and tax clearance certificates pulled inside their three-month window
✓ Full document audit before submission: name matching, date consistency, apostille authority, the 90-day criminal record window
✓ Submission to AIMA through the ARI portal's eleven upload slots, DUC generation and fee coordination
✓ Sequential family filing, handled in the right order so nothing gets rejected for going in too early
✓ Biometrics preparation and scheduling. In-person accompaniment on the day is available and quoted separately, through our partners on the ground in Porto and Lisbon
✓ A dedicated case manager who holds every moving piece: your NIFs, the bank, the courier, the lawyer, the deadlines. One thread, unlimited messaging, one person who always knows where your case stands
Not included, and where to get it
✕AIMA government fees. Set by the state, listed in full below, paid at cost.
✕Your investment and any fund subscription or management costs.
✕Translations, apostilles and document legalisation. We coordinate them, you pay the third party directly.
✕Courier and bank transfer charges.
✕Your NIF. Every applicant needs one. €79 each, five to seven business days.
✕Your Portuguese bank account, if your route needs one. Ordered separately.
✕Tax representation after the first year, and Portuguese tax advice. To learn how to keep the visa without becoming tax resident, book a tax consultation, €99. Home-country tax stays with your own adviser.
✕Travel and accommodation for biometrics. Expect three to four days in Portugal. If you'd like someone Portuguese-speaking beside you at the appointment, our partners in Porto and Lisbon can accompany you, quoted separately once AIMA assigns your office, because nobody can predict which one you'll get.
The person who makes it feel like one project instead of six
A Golden Visa is really five workstreams pretending to be one: NIFs for the whole family, a bank, a fund subscription, documents moving between countries, and a lawyer working against government deadlines. Run it yourself and you become the project manager, chasing each piece and hoping the timing lines up. Here, your case manager does the chasing. You get one thread and answers in one place.
And if something happens to your lawyer?
Eighteen months is a long time. If the partner lawyer on your case can no longer act on it, for any reason, we assign another partner lawyer at no cost to you. Your documents, powers of attorney and case history live in our system, not in one person's drawer, so your file carries on rather than starting over. Hire a solo practitioner and ask them what their version of this plan is.
The process
Eighteen months of your life, seven steps, two of them yours
You show up for step one and step six. The rest is what you're paying us for.
1
NIFs, then the money is made ready
Weeks 1 to 4 · your part
Every family member needs a Portuguese NIF. Meanwhile you get the €500,000 liquid. This is the step people underestimate: the bank or fund needs proof the full amount is available before they open anything. You can't drip-feed it in over six months. If assets need selling, that planning happens here, not later.
2
You choose your investment, the route follows
Weeks 2 to 6
You research the market, speak to fund managers and advisers directly, and decide where the €500,000 goes. That decision is yours alone and we stay out of it. Once you've chosen, the partner lawyer reviews the investment against the Golden Visa requirements and the banking route becomes clear, because a bank opening a Golden Visa account needs to know which fund the units will sit in. It's a different procedure from a normal personal account, and it can't start until you've decided.
3
Documents gathered and audited
Weeks 4 to 10
Criminal records, certified passport copies, marriage and birth certificates, apostilles. Order your criminal record last: it expires in 90 days, and clients who order it first routinely have to buy it twice. Originals ship to the lawyer's office in one courier package, and she audits every document against your passports, character by character. A middle name spelled two ways across two certificates can stall a file for weeks.
4
Investment made, declarations issued
Weeks 8 to 12
Your capital transfers and the units are registered in your name. Two documents come back, and AIMA needs both: a fund declaration confirming you own the participation units, and a bank declaration confirming the capital came into Portugal from abroad. They are not interchangeable. The wire has to show the main applicant as sender, which sounds obvious until a joint account puts two names on it and the declaration comes back wrong.
5
Submission to AIMA
2 to 6 weeks for a family
Eleven upload slots on the ARI portal. Your DUC is generated, the analysis fee is paid, and payment validation takes anywhere from three days to several weeks. Only then can your spouse go in, and only after that your children. That sequencing is a portal constraint, not us being slow, and it's why a family of four takes weeks rather than days.
6
The wait, then biometrics
8 to 10 months · your part again
Your status reads “under analysis” and nothing is required from you. We check in at month one, three, six and eight. Then biometrics in Lisbon, Porto or Faro, and you'll need fresh criminal records because the first set has expired by then. Three to four days in Portugal. If you want a Portuguese speaker beside you at the appointment, our partners in Porto and Lisbon can accompany you, quoted separately once we know which office AIMA assigns.
7
Card issued, then every two years
2 to 3 months after biometrics
Your card is printed and collected. From here you need seven days a year in Portugal, the investment held, and a renewal at years two and four. At year five you're eligible for permanent residency and can exit the fund.
Where those timelines come from
Eight to ten months to biometrics is what the files in our book are doing right now. Not marketing, arithmetic. Others quote twelve to twenty-four months, and for years they were right, so treat every number here, mine included, as a photo of today rather than a promise about next year. AIMA holds the clock, not me.
Paid tuition
Six lessons real cases taught us, so yours doesn't have to
None of this is in any official guide. All of it came from live files, and every one now sits in our checklist before your documents ever leave your house.
The wire with two names
One client's €500,000 went out from a joint account, so the bank declaration came back showing both spouses as the sender. AIMA wants the main applicant's money, full stop. Fixing it took an explanatory letter, a declaration from the spouse and the fund's cooperation. Now we check whose name a wire will carry before it leaves.
The broker that looked European
Send euros from certain international brokers and the transfer routes through their European entity, so the Portuguese bank sees an intra-EU payment instead of the international capital transfer the law requires. Same money, wrong paper trail. We now confirm the routing with the receiving side before a single euro moves.
The American Social Security card
US applicants need their Social Security card copied front and back, signed, notarised, then apostilled at state level. Almost nobody has done that to a Social Security card in their life, and finding out at submission costs you weeks. It's on our US checklist from day one.
The payment deadline nobody mentions
When AIMA generates your payment slip, the DUC, it comes with a deadline. Miss it and the application gets resubmitted, back to the start of the queue. When the portal itself broke in March 2026 and a client's DUC wouldn't generate against a ticking deadline, our lawyer took it to AIMA directly. You want someone watching that clock who has done it before.
The portal that hates tourists
The ARI portal sometimes blocks access from outside Portugal, the registration page and the login page are different addresses, and the document preview button simply doesn't work, which AIMA confirmed is not a bug, it's the portal. We tell you all of this before you try, not after you've concluded your application vanished.
The certificate that expires quietly
Portuguese tax clearance certificates are valid for three months, so pulling them early is the same as not pulling them. Same trap as the 90-day criminal records. Our lawyer sequences the perishable documents last, right before submission, and it's the single most common thing we see done backwards in files that come to us half-finished.
The numbers
Every number, on the table
My fee, the government's fees, and the five-year total. I went looking for another provider who publishes all three on one page. Still looking. Draw your own conclusions about the quotes sitting in your inbox.
Novomove Golden Visa support
€5,000main applicant and spouse
✓ €700 per additional family member: children, parents, anyone else eligible
✓ €2,500 when you engage us, €2,500 when your application reaches AIMA
✓ €1,800 per family at each two-year renewal, covering everyone on the file
✓ No Portuguese VAT for clients established outside the EU. Portuguese firms add 23% regardless of where you live.
Government fees, per person
Set by Portaria 307/2023 and paid directly to AIMA. I've seen quotes running about 28% above this schedule, dressed up as “government fees”. If a number you've been given doesn't match a line below, ask which article of the Portaria it comes from. Then enjoy the silence.
| Analysis fee, on submission | €618.60 |
| Residence permit issuance, after approval | €6,179.40 |
| Total to get your first card | €6,798.00 |
| Renewal, at year 2 and year 4 | €2,672.60 |
| Permanent residency card at year 5 | €252.10 |
| Citizenship application, civil office fee | €250.00 |
What five years actually costs
My fee plus the state's fees plus both renewals, stacked on top of your €500,000, which comes back to you at year five. Apostilles, translations, couriers, fund costs and flights sit outside this table because they vary too much for me to fake a number, and faking numbers is the other guys' department.
| Cost line | Solo | Couple | Family of 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Novomove fee | €5,000 | €5,000 | €6,400 |
| AIMA fees, initial application | €6,798 | €13,596 | €27,192 |
| Renewals at years 2 and 4, government | €5,345 | €10,690 | €21,381 |
| Renewals at years 2 and 4, Novomove | €3,600 | €3,600 | €3,600 |
| Five-year total, excluding the investment | €20,743 | €32,886 | €58,573 |
Figures rounded to the nearest euro. Government fees are set by the state and can be revised. Family of 4 assumes two adults and two children.
Banking
US citizen? Read this before you open any Portuguese bank account
I learned this one the expensive way, so you don't have to. We built a complete Golden Visa file for a US client through a big Portuguese retail bank. Submitted everything. Then, and only then, the bank confirmed in writing that it cannot hold fund participation units for US persons. FATCA. Bank-wide policy. Nothing the branch manager could do, and believe me, I asked. The account opened fine. Great for paying the electricity bill. Useless for the one thing it was opened for.
Only a handful of Portuguese banks can hold custody for a US Golden Visa investor. We send American clients to a partner bank that onboards you remotely and holds the units without the FATCA drama. It charges a few hundred euros a year more in custody than a retail bank would. Pay it and move on. The cheap account that can't hold your investment is the most expensive account you'll ever open.
And here's a plot twist: depending on the fund you pick, you might not need a Portuguese bank account at all. Some managers take your capital straight into their own client account and sort the bank declaration themselves, which quietly deletes weeks from your timeline. Pick your fund, and our team will tell you which world you're in.
Two words people mix up, at some cost
A custody account holds securities. It cannot receive a wire or make a payment. A cash account holds money and can't hold your fund units. A Golden Visa needs an account that does both, and people who open the wrong one lose a month finding out.
On PFICs, briefly
Portuguese funds are treated as PFICs by the IRS, so US investors file Form 8621 each year and most want a QEF election. Ask any manager you speak to whether they issue an annual PFIC information statement. Some do, some don't. Take the answer to your own CPA, because that question is theirs and not ours.
Straight answers
Four things I refuse to promise you
Approval
AIMA decides. No firm at any price controls that, whatever their sales deck implies. What I control is that your file goes in complete, correct, and in the right order. That's the whole job, done properly.
A date
We'll tell you what our current files are doing and what the portal is doing this month. Anyone handing you a firm approval date is guessing at you with a straight face.
Special treatment
Our partner lawyer has real working relationships inside AIMA, and they help when a case stalls. They exist precisely because nobody leans on them. I won't sell them as a queue-jump, because the day I do, they stop working.
Investment returns
Not my lane, not my licence. Regulated managers advise you on the fund, you decide, your capital is at risk. Anyone who bundles “visa help” with “trust me, this fund is great” should worry you.
Here's what going wrong looks like when we handle it
In March 2026 the ARI portal started throwing a duplicate-request error that stopped DUCs generating. One of our clients lost about four weeks to it. He heard about it from us the day it happened, then again when AIMA told our lawyer they had no fix, then again when it cleared. Other files submitted weeks either side of his went through cleanly. Government systems break and nobody on Earth can stop that. What we control is that you hear it from us the day it happens, with what it means for your file, instead of assembling the story from forum posts three weeks later.
In a client's words
Don't take my word for it. I can't edit this one.
“
“I have had very good experiences with Novomove and their services.”
Greg S.
Golden Visa client, writing on the Nomad Gate forum, March 2025
Greg wrote this on a public forum, mid-process, while AIMA's payment system was actively broken and his DUC wouldn't generate. He could have written anything. His investment choices were his own, made directly with the fund manager.
Fit
Read this before you take 15 minutes of both our lives
The call is free but your time isn't, and neither is ours. Check which column you're in first.
Around the package
The pieces that sit outside the fee
Portuguese NIF
€79Every applicant needs one, children included. Five to seven business days, and twelve months of tax representation is in the price.
Get a NIF →Bank account
Ask usGolden Visa accounts are a different product from our standard remote opening. Don't order through the website, speak to us first so you end up at the right bank.
See how it works →Lawyer consultation
€80Forty-five minutes with the partner immigration lawyer, with a written summary. The sensible move if you want a legal read before committing €500,000.
Book the lawyer →Tax consultation
€99Forty-five minutes with a certified Portuguese accountant on how Portugal treats you: what the NIF address means, when filing obligations start, and how to hold the visa without becoming tax resident here.
Book the accountant →More from our clients
What people say once the work is done.
★★★★★
They handled a complicated case well
“Our circumstances were unusual and we had questions that didn't have obvious answers. The team worked through all of them and never fobbed us off on the tricky details. Replies came quickly. We got our visa. Very grateful.”
Deniz Aydin
– Verified client · Visa
★★★★★
The visa process explained properly
“They set out the process and what they'd be doing at each point. The technical and legal parts were explained in a way that made sense. Good experience, happy to recommend.”
Kerem Yilmaz
– Verified client · Visa
★★★★★
Best consultation I've had on this
“Booked a D7 session with Mariana and it was the opposite of stiff. Felt like a conversation, but I came away with pages of notes. She worked through every question I brought and didn't hand-wave the awkward ones. A couple of edge cases she couldn't answer on the spot, so she's checking and coming back to me. That's more than I got from two other firms.”
Martin R
– Verified client · D7 visa consultation
★★★★★
So far so good
“Two people have handled my case between the NIF, the bank comparison and the D7 questions. Both knew what they were talking about and both were straight with me about what would and wouldn't work for my situation. I appreciated not being sold anything I didn't need.”
Rosalind Vogt
– Verified client · NIF, banking & D7 visa
★★★★★
Two years in and still glad I picked them
“I've been with Novomove about two years now. Things get done when they say they'll get done, I'm never left wondering what's happening, and they follow up without me having to chase.”
Marisol Jenkins
– Verified client
Collected directly from our clients after their service is complete. Read all reviews →
FAQ
Portugal Golden Visa questions
Does the Golden Visa make me a Portuguese tax resident?+
Not by itself. Tax residency follows where you actually live and what address sits on your NIF, and seven days a year in Portugal doesn't get you near the 183-day threshold. The two things that catch people out are registering a Portuguese address on the NIF, and choosing standard permanent residency at year five instead of investment PR. Both are avoidable if you know about them in advance.
How long do I have to keep the €500,000 invested?+
Five years, counted from when your residence permit is issued. The investment is tied to the Golden Visa status, so once you move to permanent residency at year five you can exit the fund. Citizenship, if you go that far, needs continued legal residence rather than continued investment.
Who counts as a family member?+
Spouse, dependent children, and dependent parents. Your spouse is inside the €5,000. Everyone else is €700 each. Children aged 16 and over need their own criminal background checks, and over 18 need to evidence dependency, usually through enrolment and financial support. Applications are filed in sequence, main applicant first, so a larger family adds weeks rather than cost.
Why is your fee lower than the quotes I'm getting?+
Quotes in this market run from about €5,000 to €10,000 for a couple doing identical work, and most Portuguese law firms add 23% VAT on top whether you live in the EU or not. We don't charge VAT to clients established outside the EU, and we split the fee across two milestones rather than taking it all upfront. Two things to check on any quote you compare: whether VAT applies to you, and whether their government fee figures match Portaria 307/2023.
Which fund should I pick?+
We can't answer that, and you should be suspicious of any immigration provider who does. Fund selection is a regulated investment decision that belongs to you, the fund manager and any adviser you engage. What we can tell you is which facts matter for the visa itself: the fund must be CMVM-registered, hold at least 60% in Portuguese-based companies, avoid property exposure, and your €500,000 must stay in for five years. Anything beyond that, exit terms, fees, performance, PFIC treatment for US citizens, take to the manager and your own adviser. Once you've decided, we verify the investment meets the AIMA requirements and build the application around it.
Do I have to travel to Portugal?+
Once for biometrics, roughly eight to ten months after submission, and everyone on the application has to come. Budget three or four days. After that, seven days a year to keep the permit alive, which most people take as a holiday. Everything else runs remotely on powers of attorney.
Can I still get to citizenship?+
Yes, on a longer road than the one you've probably read about. The qualifying period for most non-EU applicants is now ten years and the clock starts at card issuance rather than application. There's an A2 Portuguese requirement, a civic test and a clean record at the end of it. A legal challenge is still open, so this may move again. If citizenship is the whole point of the exercise for you, take the paid lawyer call before you invest.
Is the programme about to close?+
It's been rewritten before. Property was removed in October 2023 and the citizenship rules changed in 2026, and both times applications already in the system were handled under the rules in force when they were filed. Nobody can promise you the programme survives in its current shape, and we won't use that to rush you. It is a reason to be deliberate about timing rather than to sit on it for another year.
Who actually does the legal work?+
A licensed Portuguese immigration lawyer who practises independently and is registered with the Portuguese Bar Association. She takes a video call with you before the engagement starts, her name is on your order thread from that first message, and she attends your biometrics. Novomove coordinates the case, holds the documents and runs the timeline. We're a technology platform, not a law firm, and we don't pretend otherwise.
What happens if the lawyer on my case becomes unavailable?+
We assign another partner lawyer at no cost to you, and your file continues rather than restarting. Your documents, powers of attorney and full case history live in our system, so a new lawyer picks up exactly where the last one stood. Over an eighteen-month process this matters more than people think, and it's the structural difference between hiring a platform with a partner network and hiring one person.
I've already started with another provider. Can you take it over?+
Sometimes, and it depends how far in you are. If documents are apostilled and still inside their validity windows, plenty is salvageable. If your criminal records have expired or the file is already lodged, the picture changes. Bring what you have to the free call and we'll tell you plainly whether switching helps you or just costs you.
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Fifteen minutes, free, no script, no “discovery”. Tell our team your passport, your family, and when the money's actually available. You'll hear which route fits, what it costs all in, and whether we're even the right people for your case.
Book your free 15-minute call →Trusted by 7,200+ expats · €5,000 for you and your spouse, published above
And if the honest answer is that a D7 gets you everything you want for a tenth of the money, you'll hear it on that call. I'd rather lose a €5,000 sale in fifteen minutes than spend eighteen months running your Golden Visa for the wrong reasons. ~Philip